First off — I’ve been bad about my five days a week blogging schedule! I’ve been dropping Fridays lately, for no real reason other than that I’ve been pretty busy. Hopefully I can get back to my regularly scheduled weekday blogging. 
Anyway, at least I’m guaranteed to post on Mondays, because my View from Here collaboration with Catherine is going swimmingly! On to round two…
What keeps you blogging?
An appropriate question, given the way I started this entry, huh? Sometimes it seems easy to let the rest of life get in the way of carving out a bit of time to write on here — so how do I make sure I’m motivated to keep coming back?
My first motivator is a sense of responsibility. I’m not paying the bills with this or anything, so it’s not financial responsibility, and it’s not like I have 40,000 readers hanging on my every word, but I do feel like I should be consistent for the readers & advertisers that I do have. I personally have a hard time following blogs that have really sporadic updates, so I want to avoid that in my own. It’s also a bit of a sense of responsibility to myself, because this blog also works as a personal record of my life, and I don’t want to look back in a few years and realize that I missed the entirety of, say, March 2013.
[That being said, real life wins over blogging every time -- I'd rather go experience something than stay at home and write about something in the past!]
I also think habit itself is a motivator. I feel weird when I don’t blog, now, because it’s as much a part of my life as brushing my teeth or going to work. I know most people probably don’t realize if I skip a day or publish something late, but it throws me off of my regular routine when that happens! I think habit is enforced by action, and I don’t want to get into the habit of ignoring my blog, so I sit myself down when I get a chance, and I write.
That brings me to my last motivator — keeping my skills honed. I write a lot for work, yes, but this is my chance to write for me and to write in a different, casual, personal way. Without blogging I don’t really have a way to keep those skills sharp, or share them (unless I wanted people to read my actual written journal, which doesn’t sound like fun to me). When I have taken time off in the past I’ve found it challenging to jump back in, so I’d rather keep up with it as often as possible to avoid that re-learning period.
As always, check out Catherine’s answers! She is really motivated to keep a regular blogging schedule, in my opinion, so I’m interested to see how she does it (and maybe get a few tips!).
For my fellow bloggers — how do you stay motivated?
If my blog is any indication of my motivation, I think I’d fail miserably. I’ve kept the same blog for nearly 5 years and have gone through seasons of posting daily or not for months. Unfortunately that’s a good way to loose readers, but it’s honest and real, just like me. I have noticed that your updates usually come in around lunch time where I live each day, so bravo for staying super motivated.
It’s only in the last year or so that I’ve started writing regularly! The Weddingbee blog format (3+ posts a week, ideally) got me into a strong writing mindset. While I’m glad to not be writing for two blogs now, it was awesome practice for this space over here!
My editorial calendar plugin defaults to 10 AM CST, but it really seems to work well for timing.
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I think you are a natural born writer, because you write for your job and for fun. After I finished school, I had no desire to write anything, but I read and read. Now, I write every single day. I sometimes wonder if I’ll lose steam, but I think it helps that I get to choose what to write about.
Thanks for the awesome compliment!
Blogging is definitely easier than writing for a living in some ways — getting to really decide what I want to write and how I want to write it certainly helps keep things fresh.